Blogging at the intersection of urban studies and popular music

I’ve noticed that folks in the Hudson Valley can’t avoid taking the bait when the New York Times puts out a new article about the region. We griped loud and long about that one from 2011, “Williamsburg on the Hudson,” that I even wrote about. And just last month, an especially egregious bit of lifestyle...

A paper presented at the “Small Cities in the 21st Century” mini-conference, in the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Baltimore, Maryland, February 23, 2018: Urban Lift-off Amid the Rural Amenity Economy: Riverfront Cities and the “Brooklynization” of the Hudson Valley by Leonard Nevarez Vassar College ABSTRACT: What futures and fortunes await...

[I was asked to give a ten-minute “mini-keynote” talk to a meeting of academics, nonprofit and public agency execs, and civically minded business leaders at Marist College for its 2015 Sustainability Day event, at the invitation of Peter Bienstock (Hudson River Valley Institute) and Ann Davis (Economics). My subject: the Hudson Valley’s quality of life, its...

For the Musical Urbanism seminar, Hua Hsu and I were pleased to invite Piotr Orlov to speak about his research on musical legacies and migrations in upstate New York. Here’s the video of our conversation (apologies for the way his mic drops in and out between 7:30-27:00). “Leonard Nevarez and Hua Hsu of Vassar College’s...

In the endlessly diverting media game of finding the next Brooklyn, the Hudson River Valley gets referenced a lot. I suppose there’s good reason, since it’s not so much that this region rivals the urban upgrading and cultural attention associated with the New York City borough some 100 miles to the south, but that the...

Over the last month I’ve been writing for Sound It Out, a new music blog that covers adventurous new music from a snark-free, consumer-friendly point of view. “The music may be evil, but we’ll try not to be” is the motto. Most of my writings there are basic reviews and previews, but I’ve also contributed...

August 27 marks a chilling anniversary in the Hudson Valley’s musical geography: 65 years ago, Paul Robeson was to perform a concert in Peekskill that culminated in violence and effectively ended his career. I asked sociologist Dick Flacks, author of Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements, to elaborate. Paul...

Maggie Estep moved to New York in the 1980s to live the downtown life. Her calling appeared in a writing class she took for drug rehab. By the decade’s end, she was performing slam poetry regularly at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. A tiny girl with greasy hair and attitude for miles, Estep was instrumental in...

In urbanists’ excitement over music scenes and the desirability of “social and interactive street-level culture” (to invoke Richard Florida), it’s easy to lose sight of whether there’s any value to all of this besides promoting careers and urban economies. Does “enriching creative communities” actually involve extending the practice of creativity into people’s everyday lives? Or...

[Update 12 hours after originally publishing this essay: Well, this is interesting… and a little bit embarrassing: I seem to have misread the Census Flows Mapper data entirely incorrectly. So much for the “test drive”; it’s like I pulled out of the car lot and onto the highway with the emergency brake on the whole...

Remember the bands that formed in college? You heard them at dorm parties, frat parties, apartment parties, the campus bar, battle-of-the-bands competitions, and impromptu outdoor settings. They practiced in dorm rooms, dorm basements, conservatory and theater rooms, backyard sheds, and laundry rooms, amusing/irritating neighbors and passers-by. Many college rockers and rappers dreamed of making it...

Hudson NY: the day before Basilica Music Festival, a set on Flickr. For best results, view this set as a slideshow with captions on (click “Show Info”). One of the more interesting new festivals to launch this year is the Basilica Music Festival. Running three days starting tomorrow in the Hudson Valley city of Hudson, in...